The stories behind the buildings, statues and other points of interest that make Manhattan fascinating.

Monday, July 18, 2016

"The House of Romance"--The Lost Henry Ward House -- No. 23 Bond Street

The elegant marble-trimmed home was sadly neglected in 1900 -- Early New York Houses (copyright expired)

Around 1807 Bond Street was laid
out, but it would not be until around 1812 that the first house appeared.Before mid-century it would boast 60 high-end
houses which rivaled and surpassed the grandest homes on Broadway, St. James
Park and Lafayette Place.Sturges S.
Dunham, writing in Valentine’s Manual of Old New-York in 1907 noted “Bond
Street was one of the best known streets in the city a none stood higher in
favor as a place of residence.”

The elegant tone of Bond Street
was sparked in 1820 by Jonas Minturn’s marble-fronted house at No. 22. Dunham wrote “By 1835 the residential
pre-eminence of Bond street was unquestioned.”In 1827 Henry Ward and moved his family into No. 18 Bond Street; but
when the handsome new house at No. 23 was completed three years later, the
Wards moved in.

Bond Street was the enclave of the
extended Ward family.Henry Ward’s
brother, Samuel, was the head of the banking house of Prime, Ward & King,
and “the most influential financier in America,” according to Sturges S. Dunham.Following the death of his wife, the former
Julia Rush Cutler, in 1824, he moved his family into No. 16 Bond Street.(His daughter, Julia Ward Howe, would write “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic.”)

In 1829 the Wards’
father, Samuel Ward, Sr., took the new house at No. 7 Bond Street.His daughter, Anne, kept house for her
widowed father.Two other sons, John and
Richard left their father’s house around 1840 to live in No. 32 Bond Street.

Like the other Bond
Street homes, Henry Ward’s made no secret of its owner’s wealth and social
station.The red brick façade was
trimmed in white marble—including the rusticated marble basement level.Prim dormers above the cornice included
arched openings, paneled pilasters and handsome keystones within the carved
framing.The exquisite doorway (Joy
Wheeler Dow, writing in Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine in 1903, preferred to
call the style “Transitional”) with its fluted Ionic columns, sidelights and
lavish fanlight, sat above a marble stoop where highly-unusual wrought iron basket
newels perched upon paneled marble pedestals.

Living in No. 23 with the Henry
Ward was his wife, the former Eliza Hall, their only son, 10-year old Henry
(Harry) Hall Ward, and Eliza’s unmarried sister Anne Hall.Eliza and Anne came from a cultured family,
the daughters of Dr. Jonathan Hall and Bathsheba Mumford.Anne studied miniature painting with Samuel
King in Newport and Henry Ward converted the attic floor, normally reserved for
servant rooms, for her studio.

Henry Ward died in the Bond Street
house just eight years after moving in, on July 26, 1838.He bequeathed the mansion to Harry Hall Ward,
who was 18 years old.Anne Hall died in
the Bond Street house in December 1863.Her funeral, rather than being held in the drawing room or parlor here,
as expected, took place in nearby Grace Church on December 15.Harry
and his mother were now alone in the house, with their servants.

By now Bond Street, once the most
enviable address in Manhattan, was changing.Sturges S. Dunham explained “Before 1850 Bond street showed unmistakable
evidence of decline.By 1855 it had
robbed Park place of its long held distinction as the favorite street for
dentists’ offices…In 1860 a few of the old residents still lingered, but the
glory if not the fame of Bond street had vanished forever.”

Among the "few old residents" to
remain were Henry Hall Ward and his mother.Perhaps it was a sensitive family issue that took attention away from
the change in the neighborhood.Harry
was both handsome and wealthy.Joy
Wheeler Dow called him a “great beau” of the period.And he had fallen in love with a beautiful,
pedigreed young woman, Eliza Ann Partridge.

Eliza had come to New York from
Connecticut in 1830, at the age of 16.By
the time of his father’s death Henry was helplessly smitten and the New-York
Tribune would later remark “The attachment was mutual, and they became engaged.”There was a problem, however: Eliza was his
first cousin.Her mother was Bathsheba
Hall Partridge, a sister of Henry’s mother.

Although historian William Smith
Pelletreau would write in 1900 “Between this young man and his cousin Miss
Eliza Ann Partridge, there existed the strongest love and affection;” there
would never be a wedding.The Partridge
and Ward families forbade it because of their close relationship.

So Harry and Eliza went on with
their romance as if, someday, there would be a marriage.“They saw each other daily, walked and drove
together, and lived almost as much for one another as though they had been man
and wife,” wrote the New-York Tribune in 1902.

Eliza Ward’s health began to fail
around 1870.Born on November 30, 1789,
she was elderly and increasingly frail.A relative, John Ward, would later say she “was noted for a remarkable
talent for painting, intellectual power, and great benevolence.”Finally, on March 18, 1872 The New York
Herald announced she had died two days earlier in the Bond Street house, “after a long illness."Her funeral was held
in the residence that had been her home for over four decades the following
Tuesday.

That summer Harry and Eliza
summered in Saratoga, New York. While there, on August 27, Harry
died of consumption.The Tribune
remarked “and Miss Partridge was with him at the end.”

Henry Hall Ward left nearly
everything to the woman he had so long loved—including the Bond Street
mansion.The New-York Tribune reported “The
house contained many valuable paintings, including a lot of Anna [sic] Hall’s
work, and the cellar was stocked with wines of great age and value…He
bequeathed to her outright all the paintings and much of his other personal
property.”Included in his “other
personal property” were two former Ward family homes, Nos. 8 and 36 Bond
Street.

The Sun later wrote “Miss
Partridge was well-nigh broken hearted at the death of her lover.”She did not move into No. 23 Bond Street,
remaining instead in her house at No. 38 West 37th Street.But like a scene from Dickens’s Great
Expectations, she retained Harry’s valet and his housekeeper, “instructing them
to see that each room was dusted daily, and to keep everything as much as
possible in the shape in which it had been left.”She demanded that “no stranger should ever
cross the threshold.”

The Tribune later said “Miss
Partridge always regarded that house as a sacred place…She visited the house
almost daily for twenty years and more, and refused admission to all persons.”

In 1900 historian William Smith
Pelletreau commented in his Early New York Houses, “Since then, years have
passed, but the house in Bond street remains as it was.The windows are never opened and no mortal
enters the long closed doors, everything has a deserted and decaying look, and
even the large door plate has grown so tarnished that it is with difficulty
that one can read the name of its old time owner, Henry Ward.Doubtless while she lives it will remain the
same and only at her death will the gloomy portals be opened.”

Pelletreau’s prophesy could not
have been more accurate.There were only
two changes to the house. The New-York
Tribune recalled on September 21, 1902 that as old houses on the block were
being demolished for modern business buildings, “the walls of the old residence
were so shaken that Miss Partridge had all the paintings removed to her own
house.The wine was taken out of the
cellar, as the old negro [Henry’s former valet] had died under circumstances
that seemed to warrant a suspicion that he had been sampling some of the rare
vintages.”

Eliza Ann Partridge rented the
other Bond Street houses for business purposes and lived comfortably in her 37th
Street home.She was considered
eccentric by New York society and the public in general.But,
unfazed by stares on the street, she forged on.The Tribune noted “She was an indefatigable pedestrian and was much in
the open air.”

On Friday morning, September 19,
1902 Eliza died at the age of 89.Two
days later the New-York Tribune wrote “With the death of Miss Eliza Ann
Partridge, which occurred on Friday morning, at her home, No. 38 West
Thirty-seventh st., there ended a romance which dated back half a century.”The writer said “Miss Partridge seemed to
live almost entirely in the past.She
even did not seem to grow old.Up to the
day of her death she could see and hear as well as ever; her teeth and hair
were in perfect preservation, and her skin was without a wrinkle.”

No. 23 Bond Street had not fared
so well.“The old Ward house in Bond-st.
shows many more signs of age than did the loyal woman that kept it so jealously…The
high windows are heavily shuttered, and the whole place seems dead from the
outside.”

Eliza Ann Partridge’s substantial
estate went mostly to her extended family, $30,000, for instance, going to her
nephew John Partridge Jepson along with her “pictures, books, statuary, wine
and household effects.”She was generous
to her household staff, leaving $2,000 to her chambermaid, Mary Walsh; and
$1,000 each to her cook Julia Walsh and her laundress Margaret Hennessy.Her housekeeper, Mrs. Smith received $100 and
her butler, James Campion, $500.(Campion’s inheritance would equal more than $14,000 in 2016.)

But by the terms of Henry Hall
Ward’s will, the three Bond Street properties reverted to the Ward family.“Then
the long darkened rooms were thrown open,” remarked The Sun on December 17,
1904.The day before the newspaper’s
comment all three “old mansions of another age,” as described by The Evening
World, had been sold.No. 23 brought
$44,000—about $1.2 million today.

The Evening World remarked “The
house of New York’s real-life ‘Miss Havisham,’ No. 23 Bond street, went to the
highest bidder to-day, under the unromantic hammer of a prosaic auctioneer, who
probably never heard of the faded and dried-up orange blossoms which Eliza Ann
Partridge cherished for sixty years in the old mansion until she died.”

But before the house was sold, the
family had gone through it, removing the antique furnishings, carpets and
bric-a-brac from their museum-like setting.Some of what they found was unexpected and valuable.Samuel Ward, Sr. had been Governor of New
York and a noted figure in the Revolutionary War.The New York Times reported that when the
Bond Street house was opened, “it was found to contain many curios and relics
of all sorts including letters written by Washington.”

Also found in the house were Anne
Hall’s miniatures.The Times
reported three years later “Aside from numerous finished portraits, are
ivories, in varied stages of development, including several of the artist’s
first sketches, disclosing the travail through which her art passed before
enshrinement in the velvet or metal cases in which they have been buried all
these vanished years.”The article found
the child portraits of great interest; including those of “Julia Ward Howe and
her brothers, Samuel and Henry at the ages of ten, eleven, and thirteen years.”

The new owners of No. 23 Bond
Street were interested neither in the romantic history of the house, nor in its
exquisitely preserved interiors.Within
a year of its sale Architects’ and Builders’ Magazine commented “the house has
been turned into a kind of sweat shop…The inner doorway of the vestibule has
been taken away bodily, no doubt to adorn some modern Colonial house, also the
tapering posts of wrought iron, and the startling newel of the staircase.Mockery of an intense drama.”

In 1907 Valentine’s Manual of Old
New-York lamented “For thirty years the old house stood empty, becoming more
and more dilapidated as the seasons passed, but in the end its solitude was
invaded by the click of typewriters and the whir of sewing machines.It still stands, dingy and unkempt, tenanted
now by makers and sellers of cheap millinery.”

In 1907 surviving Bond Street mansions, once home to Manhattan's wealthiest citizens, suffered indignation. The Ward House, No. 23, is at the far right. Valentine's Manual of Old New-York, 1907 (copyright expired)

The house survived, more or
less.Once referred to as “the house of
romance,” its history had been forgotten by the time it was sold in 1921 as “a
three story business building.”

After 175 years the Ward house
finally fell, to be replaced by No. 25 Bond Street, an eight-story residential
structure designed by BKSK Architects.